The Art of Palmistry: A Practical Guide to Reading Your Fortune

This is a good basic palmistry book for readers who are just getting started on the road to reading hands. It's a hard back with full-color illustrations and photographs. The material is quite well organized. The front of the book begins with an overview of the entire hand with a few pages of remarks about quirks and oddities like broken lines, crosses, islands, stars and whorls that may be seen in palms. This is followed by an overview of major lines and the Mounts, the planet-related sectors of the palm.

Pages 19 to 29 feature pages filled with several small photographs of different hands, each illustrating a different type of life line with a brief description (i.e., Life Line - “starts low, closer to thumb”; or “appears to be short, appears to be broken”, etc) and the page number. This is followed by a couple of pages with photos of heart lines, head lines, etc, with brief descriptions and page numbers so they're quite easy to find. This is a very clever way to help a reader zoom in on a particular type of line and proceed straight to the description and delineations of it.
 
Pages 31 – 41 provide full descriptions of the Mounts, showing the location, a description of what part of life and/or personality traits it relates to, a larger photo of a palm with “Complementary Readings,” short paragraphs of other areas of the palm in the photo that relate to the mound or add interesting tidbits to the topic.

In-depth descriptions of the lines (as shown in the photographs from pp 19-29) begin on page 43. The hand photos present a variety of test subjects whose palms demonstrate variations on each major line. The delineations include “Complementary Readings” with arrows pointing to additional features in each palm worthy of mention or relevant to the line being discussed.

The photos in these sections are enlarged for better visibility. For the most part, the lines on each palm are pretty clear, although a few have some shadowing that would have benefited from better lighting.

Although this book is formatted as a relatively small 7” x 9” size, it's an excellent book packed with a myriad of tips and advice for a beginner in palmistry, along with extremely easy access to clearly-written and well-organized material. Additional books in this series include "The Art of Astrology" and "The Art of Numerology."

This palmistry book is recommended for people who want an easy-access reference book for getting started or improving on their palm-reading skills. The formatting is very well organized, and the photographs and illustrations are clear and helpful.

~review by Elizabeth Hazel

Editor: Anna Southgate
Quantum Publishing Ltd/Sterling Ethos, 2016
144 pages, $12.62